JD Vance has gotten a lot of deserved criticism for the offhand way he dismissed the Apalachee School shooting.
If you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.
[snip]
I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality we live in.
[snip]
We don’t have to like the reality that we live in. But it is the reality that we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.
Trump, of course, famously told the families grieving after a shooting in Perry, Iowa, “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
It’s not just that JD’s proposed solution is to box everyone up in aquariums like the Secret Service has done to Trump, but the way in which both men want to pray (or feign prayer, in Trump’s case) and move on.
Compare that to how Trump’s own people are treating his own shooting.
Vance, of course, didn’t blame some “psycho who wanted to make headlines” for Trump’s shooting. Instead, he blamed Joe Biden.
And Trump’s top propagandist, Stephen Miller, won’t shut up about Trump’s shooting.
Trump’s people want people to obsess about his own shooting, a month ago, even while minimizing the impact of a shooting that killed four, including two kids. That’s true, even though all the evidence to date suggests that Thomas Crooks shares many similarities with school shooters like accused Georgia shooter Colt Gray, including a fascination with previous school (and in Crooks’ case, presidential) shooters.
Even given all of the Secret Service’s failures, Donald Trump was not a soft target, like schools are. But ultimately he, too, was vulnerable to an assault rifle in the hands of a disturbed young man hoping for notoriety.
Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance don’t want to get over that shooting attempt, and the murder of Corey Comperatore. They need Trump to be more special than all the kids gunned down in their schools. They need Trump’s shooting to have a meaning they won’t ascribe to the murder of children in their classrooms.
And yet Trump is no more special a victim than the teenagers killed in Georgia.